Because there's a low below the low you know.

What The Center For Healthy Sex Says About “Helping You Heal”: Part I

I’ve been all over the internet, checking up on what the sex addiction recovery industry is doing and saying, and I’ve seen the slow shift over to giving lip service to partner trauma and the Trauma Model of treatment. What they fail to do, and what is essential to the health and safety of partners, is call the behaviors of sex addicts “abuse” and the addicts “abusers.” It is still an addict-centered approach that they offer, and it requires the partner’s cooperation. It calls for her to sign up for the very real possibility of further abuse. I’m baffled by this. No one would tell the spouse of a wife-beater to stay and help him learn to manage his rage.

And why stay? Because the recovery statistics are so great? (What statistics?) Because she’s almost guaranteed happiness if she stays? Living with a sex addict is a hell of fear and abuse. It’s a continuous pummeling of your self esteem. It’s the worst kind of loneliness. Leaving’s not easy. It is a difficult, torturous process with a long road to healing. But staying is an even longer, more treacherous road, with the likelihood of ending up in a ditch.

One cheerleader for the coupleship, the ol’ ‘stay-and-work-it-out,’ is Alexandra Katehakis. Katehakis is the Clinical Director at The Center for Healthy Sex. Besides her pretty prolific article writing, she is the author of a couple of books for recovering sex addicts. In the first, Erotic Intelligence: Igniting Hot Healthy Sex While in Recovery from Sex Addiction, we find a pretty manipulative passage to my point:

Many partners of addicts have told me they feel bad about themselves for staying in the relationship because of the betrayal they’ve experienced. They imagine that the people who know their past judge them to be stupid for staying with the person who’s caused them so much pain. I often counter this thinking, explaining that leaving may seem quick and easy because they can pretend they’re okay and the problem has disappeared. However, if you leave your relationship, you’ll be stuck with your pain and sorrow without the person you loved to help you sort it out. Why is this true? Because even though it feels as if your pain comes from your partner, it’s actually coming from inside you.

We all know how easy leaving is, right? That simple task of dismantling your entire life–a home and family, of explaining to your kids why they’ll be splitting time with Mommy and Daddy and why Mommy is probably going to be poor. It’s a breeze. But we also know how much help that “person you loved” would be with “sorting it out.” Sex addicts are notoriously helpful. Oh, and it doesn’t feel as if he caused the pain; he actually caused it–the same way he’d have caused it if he punched her in the face, the same way a rapist causes pain to his victim.

The second book is called Mirror of Intimacy: Daily Reflections on Erotic Intelligence, and it’s chock-full of sparkly gems such as:

There are marvelous sea creatures whose existences can be viewed only within the deep blue sea, and similarly we all have dear secrets that can be spoken only in the habitat of the heart.

And this:

Observe the rhythm of passers-by on the street, at work, everywhere. Summon loving acceptance and let their tempos move you emotionally and corporeally. Try to assimilate new ideas by trying out the rhythms of those you encounter.

I pull from the second book just for shits and giggles. These were actually written for sex addicts– people who find it difficult to pass any attractive person on the street without objectifying them and storing their images for “alone time.” Rhythms, yes. Dear secrets indeed.

Well, I haven’t even gotten to what I really wanted to talk about, the power point for partners from Alexandra’s Center for Healthy Sex. Why don’t you take a look at it on your own.

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2 Responses

I think you could probably do a stand-alone blog just on Alex…just sayin’.

What does, “we all have dear secrets that can be spoken only in the habitat of the heart” even mean? Ugh.

This quotes you used are just off on so many points:
“if you leave your relationship, you’ll be stuck with your pain and sorrow without the person you loved to help you sort it out.” …

No, if you leave, you will be without the person who hurt, lied, stole, emotionally abused, betrayed, and potentially exposed you to life threatening diseases. This is the person you want to help you “sort it out”? I don’t think so.

And believe me, the best way to be stuck with the pain and sorrow is to stay in relationship and be continually emotionally abuses. Leaving gives you the opportunity to heal and move on. Just like getting out from under the truck that keeps running you over help you heal and move on.

Why does the CSATs’ advice always assume that the addict is going to actually go into recovery? We know from experience that that often doesn’t happen even in the best of circumstances when the couple/family has resources like time and money to afford good therapy. We know that even when SA’s attend meetings, they come home saying how they aren’t “like the other addicts”. We know they often keep up the same behavior but they just get better at lying and hiding it. In fact, they can even learn about how to do this at their meetings. I know some CSATs who will admit this in private, but publicly, they sugarcoat their treatment model while giving no statistics based on any kind of research to back it up. And they are putting women’s lives and women and children’s emotional and financial well-being at risk for the sake of what? Their job security?

Let ‘s just assume that it’s true- that the SA does immediately go into recovery. Let’s take the CSATs’ word for it that the addict is suffering from toxic shame and family of origin issues, and blah blah blah whatever else they say led to the addiction. And also, according to them, it takes 5 years of recovery, if addicts work hard, for their brain to “rewire”. Meanwhile, the “addict brain” means that addicts engage in lying, blame-shifting, emotional reasoning, jumping to conclusions, etc. Assuming everything CSATs say is true, how is the addict going to help their partner “sort it out”? It sounds like they have plenty to do just trying to sort themselves out. Oh, and that person who is supposed to help you “sort it out” will be going to counseling and 12 step groups almost every day of the week, so you won’t see them, you can’t ask questions when you do see them, and you get stuck with all the home and family duties.

CSATs also don’t tell you that by staying, you also forfeit your right to claim adultery as fault in an at-fault state.